The use of satellite distribution of television signals has introduced numerous opportunities and techniques for providing viewers with a wide variety of news, entertainment, educational and sports programming. Conceptually, a number of these opportunities require some means of accurately switching between different program sources and/or controlling local equipment at the satellite receive locations.
The 24 hour satellite news network represents one such situation wherein sources of news of a national, regional and local nature as well as regional and local commercial matter are each allocated time slots in a given hour of programming thus requiring the appropriate switching and machine control capability at each local cable television system head end and the appropriate coordination of the various operations involved in producing and uplinking the news.